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In Cairo, Tahrir Square women fear gang rape

Something looks strange and wrong in the photos coming out of Cairo. Egyptians have been celebrating the substitution of one tyranny for another. But take a closer look.

The photos are unisex. By this I mean they’re almost always all male.

CBS correspondent Lara Logan is pictured in Cairo's Tahrir Square moments before she was assaulted in this Feb. 11, 2011 photo. (Reuters)

In the case of the Star’s front page photo of Tahrir Square on Thursday, they were all female, which is laudable but raised another question. In a public demonstration for freedom, why are women segregated from men? Because they’re afraid of being gang-raped by their fellow freedom fighters.

I am skeptical about the Arab Spring. It is a female skepticism born of experience. Always look more closely at every structured segment of information you’re given. What question isn’t being answered? What information lies mute in a photograph?

“Egypt’s Morsi is gone. Now the danger begins,” ran one newspaper headline. Not true. Half of Egypt has always been in danger. It is just as terrible for women in that country now as it was while President Mohammed Morsi was in charge, as it was in 2011 when Hosni Mubarak fell from power. It’s just a different kind of danger.

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Egypt is notorious for the constant assaults on women in public places but Tahrir Square is a particularly horrifying place. It is Rape Central, as Human Rights Watch has documented, and it is an emblem, a map, of how freedom is divisible.

Human Rights Watch says 91 women were sexually assaulted and in some cases raped in the four days of protests that began on June 30.

Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault runs a hotline for the reporting of sexual assaults and has teams of volunteers trying to protect women from attack, Human Rights Watch says. These latest reports are almost beyond belief. On Nov. 23, a 30-year-old musician named Yasmine El Baramaway was attacked and raped for 90 minutes in the square by a group of 15 men that grew to more than 100.

“At the height of the attack,” she told HRW, I looked up and saw 30 individuals on a fence. All of them had smiling faces, and they were recording me with their cellphones. They saw a naked woman, covered in sewage, who was being assaulted and beaten, and I don’t know what was funny about that. This is a question that I’m still thinking about, I can’t stop my mind from thinking about that.”

When the CBS journalist Lara Logan was torn nearly limb from limb — her muscles were literally ripped, she said — in the square in 2011, some questioned whether Western female journalists should be allowed to work in Egypt. It was an odd response, as if they were questioning whether Egypt should allow women to be present in any situation with agitated men. Logan was attacked, but all women are under the threat of attack.

The police stay away from the square. The government, which claims it is taking steps to protect women, does nothing. In February 2012, HRW reported, “members of the Shura Council, Egypt’s legislative body, blamed women” for being attacked. One member, Gen. Adel Afifi, said, “Women contribute 100 percent in their rape because they put themselves in such circumstances.”

It’s not much different from the Toronto policeman who in 2011 inspired international SlutWalk by telling women not to dress like “sluts” lest they be raped. We’re blamed for how we dress, for our location, for existing. It’s like saying women shouldn’t hold down jobs lest they be paid less than men.

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I am deeply cynical about any revolution that excludes women but I notice that most of them do. The second wave of Western feminism was partly fuelled by the realization that men in the 1960s anti-war movement wanted women for sex and sandwiches. Women were going to have to rescue themselves.

Any single-sex group is flawed, its exclusionary base doing damage that only appears under scrutiny. There’s no cause for the West to be smug about the treatment of women in the Muslim world.

Look at the U.S. armed forces, where there were 26,000 sexual assaults reported in 2012 (in an anonymous survey), an increase of about 35 per cent over the two previous years. There were only 3,374 formal complaints, resulting in 238 convictions, as CBC.ca has reported. And look at the wave of stories about decades of sexual harassment in the RCMP.

Is this better than Tahrir Square?

I am wary of alleged triumphs. Women are making great strides in the newspaper industry, yes, now that the industry is in turmoil. Girls are doing better than boys in school, causing an avalanche of faux concern about discrimination against boys.

In the 17th century, Shakespeare’s stages were empty of actresses. Today the British are pondering removing the last female image from their currency.

Females have been erased throughout history and it has to end now. The evidence is before your eyes. A revolution that leaves half the population subjugated isn’t a revolution.

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